


In Which Martin's Stomach Repeatedly Suffers

by Euphoric_Mandelbulb



Category: Cabin Pressure
Genre: Excessive Epilogue, Food, Food Horror, Food Poisoning, Gen, Hospitalization, Humor, Humour, I Do Not Know How To Format Footnotes, Poisoning, Surstromming Has Nothing On This Lot, Trigger Warning: Disgusting Food, Trigger Warning: Mild Harm To Animal (Off-Screen And Non-Graphic), Trigger Warning: Vomiting References
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-13
Updated: 2014-07-13
Packaged: 2018-02-08 17:37:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1950117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Euphoric_Mandelbulb/pseuds/Euphoric_Mandelbulb
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How *does* Martin manage to shift pianos and furniture on a diet of toast and pasta? He must be getting vitamins from *somewhere*.</p><p>Set sometime between "Ottery St Mary" and "Uskerty".<br/>Slight spoilers for "Gdansk", "Limerick", "Qikiqtarjuaq", "Newcastle", and "Ottery St Mary". [Later note: Zurich-compliant. Spelling and formatting edited in places.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Which Martin's Stomach Repeatedly Suffers

**Author's Note:**

> Rated T for mildly disturbing and/or disgusting content, including non-graphic description of offscreen harm to a pigeon.
> 
> Not beta'd, because I have no beta :-( Did not need Britpicking, because I *am* British :-)

The phone made a very odd series of bleeps and trills (Arthur had fiddled with the buttons and hadn't been able to change it back to the normal ring). Arthur charged down the stairs, making a racket comparable to the Light Brigade, and almost tore the phone cable out of the wall in his eagerness to answer.  
  
“Hello! Knapp-Shappey and Shappey residence speaking!”  
  
A female voice replete with boredom answered. “Hello, may I please speak to Carolyn Knapp-Shappey? It -”  
  
“May it be myself's pleasure to conveyance a message from yourself to herself at this time?”  
  
“...Would it be at _all_ possible for me to speak to her directly?”  
  
“Well, possibly, in the event of the eventuality that she -”  
  
“Arthur! I've picked up my extension now,” Carolyn said over the phone.  
  
“Oh, brilliant! Yourself now has connectivity to -”  
  
“Arthur, put your phone _down_.”  
  
“Oh, right, sorry Mum!” Arthur hung up and went to wait by his Mum's door, ready to find out whether they had a client.  
  
  
***** FIVE MINUTES LATER*****  
  
  
“Arthur!”  
  
“Sorry, Mum!... Er, what have I done?”  
  
“Have you been secretly cooking?”  
  
“Er... well, I've _tried_ to but it never _stays_ secret! You always hear it somehow!”  
  
“As does half the population of England, I should think; the microwave may never recover no matter how many lemons are ritually sacrificed to it. But have you _kept_ any of your nightmarish concoctions?”  
  
“I ate them, mostly. Well, the bits that weren't stuck to the bowls. Or the trays. Or the ceiling...”  
  
“ _Yes_ , I get the picture. But most importantly, did you feed any of _anything_ to my pilots?”  
  
“I offered sometimes, but you know they won't eat my cooking, Mum!”  
  
“Martin might just possibly give in if he had a bad month. Now, tell me truthfully: did you feed Martin _any_ of your cooking?”  
  
Arthur dredged through the pea-souper of his memory.“...no. No, I offered him some biscuits, but he didn't want them because they were green and smelt of rust. Oh, wait, he did have one bite of a scone!”  
  
Carolyn dropped her head into her hand. “Oh _no_...”  
  
“...but he spat it out because it tasted of soap. They did actually really _really_ taste of soap, but I hadn't put soap in them, and I tried mixing one with water and it didn't go bubbly so it can't have _made_ soap inside it when it cooked, so I don't know _what_ went wrong -”  
  
“Yes, yes, all _right_ , Arthur! The scones were three weeks ago, it can't have been that. Go and find your shoes, we're going to see Martin in hospital.”  
  
Arthur looked stricken. “Oh, no! Has Skip hurt his ankle again?!”  
  
“No, he's eaten something poisonous which, astonishingly enough, _doesn't_ seem to have been your fault; he's only just come round enough to tell them his emergency contact number, which for some reason is my dubious honour. How he managed to poison himself with toast and pasta I can't imagine.”  
  
“Ooh, hold on, I'll just fetch some Toblerones for him!”  
  
“No you _won't_ , he's been chucking his guts up as though he wants a divorce from his digestive system, he'll probably be on a dripfeed.”  
  
“What's that?”  
  
“Liquid food that gets dripped into your blood through a tube, for people who can't eat because they're ill.”  
  
“Oh, _wow_! Couldn't we put melted Toblerone in that, then?”  
  
“Well, if you _want_ to give him liver damage and kidney failure, go right ahead!”  
  
“...sorry, Mum.” Arthur looked ashamed. It was a little disturbing to see him visibly droop.  
  
“I suppose he'll be able to eat Toblerone soon... you _could_ bring one as an incentive for him to stop being ill to the point of complete uselessness.”  
  
“Brilliant!” Cheeriness restored, Arthur ran to the conservatory to raid his Toblerone collection.  
  
  
***** TWENTY MINUTES LATER*****  
  
  
“Wait in the car, Arthur; I'll only be a minute.”  
  
“Ooh, are you going shopping? Are _you_ getting Toblerones for Skip too?”  
  
“ _No_ \- I think you're giving him a year's supply as it is. If the hospital is as I recall it, the Internet access is ridiculously expensive and he'll be bored even more witless without it. I want him to fly my aeroplane, not fling himself off a roof, so I'm going to see if the charity bookshop has anything about aviation which isn't actually in pieces. And you are _not_ going to come with me, or touch _anything_ in my car.”  
  
  
***** FIVE MINUTES LATER THAN THAT*****  
  
  
Carolyn left the shop, feeling smug. The _perfect_ book for a pedantic pilot who constantly complained about Karl at ATC and never met a rule or regulation that he couldn't love!  
  
  
***** ANOTHER TEN MINUTES LATER*****  
  
  
Martin was indeed on a dripfeed (two bags, in fact – presumably one was food and one was medicine), and in addition to a bright red face (even by his standards) had the slightly haunted look peculiar to those who have recently found it necessary not only to use a bedpan, but to do so in the presence of a nurse. A basin by the side of the bed hinted that his stomach hadn't entirely finished rebelling against his dictatorship just yet.  
  
“And there's our idiot pilot. When are you going to stop lazing around and get back to work, miserable underling?”  
  
“HELLO SKIP! Ugh, you look _really_ ill! But we've brought you some presents, so now it's like your birthday except you're stuck in bed! So it's sort of like Gran's birthday, before she died, except you're not deaf, or old, and you do actually probably remember who we are, and...”  
  
Martin groaned. “Hello, Arthur. Could you please keep it down a bit?”  
  
“Why?!”  
  
“Because a lot of the people here are feeling a lot more ill than I do. Also, my head feels like I have flu _and_ a hangover.”  
  
“Oh, right, sorry Skip. But anyway, look, I brought you a present for when you're better! Can you guess what it is?” Arthur held up a shopping-bag.  
  
Martin sighed. “A Toblerone?”  
  
“Ooh, close, but not quite. It is... dah dahdah daaaaah... LOTS of Toblerones from tiny to HUGE for as you get better and better!” Arthur tipped the bag upside-down, and Martin was drenched in about a kilo of Toblerones.  
   
“Oh... er, wow, thank you, Arthur... hold on, I thought they didn't make this one any more?” Martin peered at two limited-edition Toblerones with suspiciously faded wrappers.  
  
“Oh, they don't, not for _ages_ , but you're important, Skip, so you deserve a share of my ones which I've been saving!”  
  
“Er... thank you...” Martin surreptitiously checked the use-by dates, confirmed that these two would probably make him relapse, and resolved to check all of the others after Arthur left. Still, chances were that most of these were fresh (given Arthur's potentially record-breaking daily Toblerone intake), and if the students hadn't broken the serrated knife again then he could probably split them into _months'_ worth of portions, every one representing a day when he didn't need to take an iron tablet. That might only save two pence per day, but in two weeks that was enough for a packet of spaghetti...  
  
“Martin, answer me truthfully. _How_ did you manage to poison yourself without the help of idiot-features here? I find it horrifically easy to imagine you cleaning and sterilising your kitchen to within an inch of its life before every meal, so it can't have been anything the students did. Were you reduced to toasting mouldy bread, you pathetic little pilot?”  
  
Martin closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and grimaced. “I... well, multivitamins are quite expensive, and then one day the students had been clearing some scrub to make way for allotments and they made nettle soup, and that gave me the idea -”  
  
“Martin, is this story going to end with you eating the wrong sort of mushrooms?”  
  
“ _No_ , actually -”  
  
“Oh, that's lucky, Skip, because Bob from up the road ate those wrong mushrooms once and he ended up running past our house in only a dressing-gown and one shoe, and he was screaming that a giant Mars Bar was chasing him, and I think the police arrested him.”  
  
“...I don't think your mum meant _that_ sort of wrong mushrooms, Arthur.”  
  
“Oh. Well, they only grow in that one field near the sewage works anyway, so it's easy to not eat them!”  
  
“How do you _know_ about these mushrooms, Arthur?”  
  
“George the engineer told me all about them when I told him about Bob from up the road, and that's when I realised that I saw them once, years ago when I had to go with Mum to the sewage works to ask for her diamond earrings back because she'd decided too late to sell them instead of flushing them away, and there were some people picking the wrong mushrooms but I didn't find out that they _were_ wrong mushrooms until years later, so I couldn't warn those people and I worry sometimes that they ended up _really_ ill!”  
  
“...I'm sure they didn't, Arthur.”  
  
“Oh, really Skip? Phew!”  
  
“ _Anyway_ , no, no mushrooms were eaten in the making of this disaster. All the mushrooms looked more-or-less the same when I looked them up online, so I didn't want to risk it. No, I've been, er, _supplementing_ my diet with wild plants, and, um, one of the goosefoots I found in the park turned out to not actually be a goosefoot after all. And I only realised that I'd made a mistake when my stomach tried to move to the Outer Hebrides.”  
  
Arthur looked confused. “Why would your stomach want to live there? Herc says the Outer Hebrides are _really_ boring; when he collects passengers there, sometimes they cry with relief and give him huge tips!”  
  
“I meant 'when I _started throwing up_ ,' Arthur.”  
  
“Oh! Like in Canberra when Douglas said we'd be making monjayaki all night if we ate those horrid kebabs! That had me confused for ages, I thought he meant we'd break into the hotel kitchens to cook Japanese food because he didn't like the kebabs! Do you remember, Skip?”  
  
Martin scowled. “ _Yes_ , I _do_. Put me right off Japanese food for a while, so it was probably a very _deliberate_ choice of words.”  
  
“Martin, even Douglas Richardson did not predict and could not have predicted that we'd get a last-minute booking two days later to spend three days flying dignitaries around Japan.”  
  
“I wouldn't put it past him.”  
  
“ _Anyway_ , since Martin is now turning a frankly revolting shade of greenish-grey which I'd been under the impression was exclusively reserved for corpses, let's change the subject, shall we? So, Martin, you've been ravaging the wilds of Fitton for your meat and two veg, like your cave-dwelling ancestors?”  
  
“Oh, _wow_! Skip's grandparents live in a _cave_? Brilliant!”  
  
“Not his grandparents, witless dingbat. Add about five hundred “greats” to “grandparents” and you'll be nearer the mark.”  
  
Arthur looked blank.  
  
“Remember how everybody is descended from cave people? That even, unbelievable though it may seem when you look at him, includes Captain Martin Crieff.”  
  
“Speaking of which, Carolyn, I _haven't_ been “ravaging” anything. I've been very careful, not taken very much of anything – which was just as well, otherwise I might have _died_ \- and, _and_ , only plants. Not _meat_ at all.”  
  
“I should have guessed you'd be a useless hunter. Ten thousand years ago, you'd have been thrown off a cliff and eaten for dinner.”  
  
“I am _not_ a useless hunter! ...er, at least, I don't _know_ if I am. It's just that, well, there was this pigeon.”  
  
“Oh _dear_ , did the _poor_ little pilot get pecked by a big scary _pigeon_?”  
  
“NO! It wasn't _like_ that! It was blind, its eyes were all... crusted, it was walking in circles, it couldn't fly, it looked terrified - and I _did_ , I did catch it, I... put it out of its misery -”  
  
“Good grief, _you_ actually wrung a bird's neck? I would have thought your arms would snap before the pigeon did.”  
  
“Carolyn, I move _furniture_ for my _actual_ living! If I hadn't sprained my ankle, I would have moved that bloody piano _single-handedly_! That's why I spend _so_ much of what little money I have on iron tablets and multivitamins and things, because I _need_ to be _able_ to build as much muscle as I can!”  
He paused, breathed heavily a few times, then continued more quietly. “And, also, I didn't actually _wring_ its neck. I, er, hit it on the head with a stone. Except that it didn't work, so in the end...” He sighed, sounding defeated. “... in the end, I had to put the stone on its neck and _stand_ on it, okay? You're right, I _am_ a useless hunter. But that – _that_ wasn't the problem. The real problem was, if I wanted to eat the pigeon, where was I going to prepare it? I couldn't exactly start plucking it and cutting it open in the middle of a field! I thought about the woods, or the back of my van, or even the kitchen – I couldn't do _anything_ to that kitchen worse than the students have thought up, I've lost count of the number of times I've had to mop the _ceiling_ – but every time, I thought, what if someone sees? I'll look like a _psychopath_!”  
  
“How could anyone see into the back of your van, Skip? It's got no windows in that bit! Unless someone had X-Ray vision...”  
  
“X-Rays don't go through metal, Arthur.”  
  
“Superman's do.”  
  
“Well, nobody has Superman vision, okay? And I meant _afterwards_ – I'd have to clean out the back of the van, and what if someone saw all the blood and feathers and stuff? I'd be arrested!”  
  
“Indeed. That van is terrifying enough to parents as it is.”  
  
“Why would parents be terrified of Skipper's van, Mum?”  
  
“Because their children might get stuck in there and nobody would spot them. _Changing the subject_ , what _did_ you do with the pigeon's mortal coil in the end, Martin?”  
  
“I... left it there. At the edge of the field. Hopefully a fox or something ate it before any _children_ could find it.”  
  
“Children _love_ finding animal corpses. Poking them with sticks keeps the little brats amused for hours.”  
  
“ _I_ didn't love finding them, Mum!”  
  
“ _Normal_ children do.”  
  
“Hey...” protested Arthur.  
  
“As opposed to _kind-hearted_ little imbeciles.”  
  
“Oh, thanks Mum!”  
  
“Hmm – what day was this, Martin?”  
  
“Oh, er... about a month ago, I'm not sure _exactly_ -”  
  
“Ah, so _you_ enabled my dog to present Herc with a maggot-ridden putrefying pigeon!”  
  
“Oh God, I'm sorry Carolyn! I'm _so_ sorry -”  
  
“Whyever should you be? The look on his face was worth photographing. Ridiculous _vegetarian_ man.”  
  
“Oh. Er... glad to have... been of service?”  
  
“Ooh, Mum, you haven't given Skip his other present!”  
  
“What other present?”  
  
“You said you'd buy him a book! About planes!”  
  
“Oh, _this_!” Carolyn pulled a paperback out of her bag. “This isn't a _present_ , it's a necessary expense to keep my company endowed with the minimum number of pilots by preventing the Captain from going doolally! Cheaper than paying for Internet access.” She dropped the book heavily onto Martin's lap. “Here. Enjoy, you pitiful little aeroplane-addict. And by the time you've finished shirking your duties, I intend to have ordered a book about wild plants and had it sent to your house, because this is _not_ going to happen again, do I make myself clear?!”  
  
“Yes, sorry – wait, do I need to pay you back?”  
  
“Again, it's a business expense. Don't mention it.”  
  
“Well, thank you -”  
  
“No, _literally_ don't mention it.”  
  
“That reminds me – where's Douglas? I'd have thought he'd _relish_ gloating about this, what with him being Chef Excellence as well as Sky God and Piano Virtuoso. He can probably identify sodding _mushrooms_ too.”  
  
“Mum said we mustn't tell Douglas because he'll be smug.”  
  
“If there's one thing that First Officer Richardson does _not_ require, it's any further source of ridicule. He'd be utterly unbearable. Don't go telling him, either of you. And, Arthur?”  
  
“Yes, Mum?”  
  
“Don't tell Douglas that Martin ' _definitely didn't_ make a mistake and eat something poisonous', either.”  
  
“Oh, right, sorry Mum.”  
  
“Arthur, could you also _please_ not tell Douglas _anything_ about me trying to eat wild plants? Otherwise he'll spend the next week singing _Poisoning Pigeons In The Park_ and making cavem- er, caveperson jokes. Or Bear Grylls jokes. Or-”  
  
“But you haven't been grilling any bears – have you, Skip? I hope you haven't, bears are _brilliant_! I don't think it's very nice to cook bears and eat them, Skip!”  
  
“Arthur! There _aren't_ any bears _in_ this country, and if there were I would not be going anywhere near their teeth and claws and... ugh, anyway, I wouldn't eat them.”  
  
“Aw, thanks Skip!” Arthur tried to hug Martin and was swatted away by Carolyn.  
  
“You'll crush him and knock his drip loose, you silly boy, and then he'll be in here for weeks on end.”  
  
“Sorry, Mum. Sorry, Skip.”  
  
“Oh, Carolyn?”  
  
“Yes, what is it – unless it's about planes or pay, in which case don't bother me with it.”  
  
“It's not... I was thinking, under what circumstances would it be, um, _acceptable_ for me to...”  
  
“Get on with it!”  
  
“...put something nasty but not _deadly_ – such as, for example, that not-a-goosefoot – in Douglas' food while we're on standby?”  
  
“ _Martin_ , I didn't think you had it in you!”  
  
“Of course I have poison in me, that's why I'm in hospital!”

  
  
*****EPILOGUE*****  
  
  


Upon his arrival home from hospital - and after he'd cleaned the kitchen and the bathrooms, unblocked the sink, and tried valiantly (to no avail) to remove the mysterious orange stain from the living-room carpet - Martin found a parcel outside his bedroom door. True to her word, Carolyn had ordered him a guide to wild food – it even covered seaweeds and shellfish.  
For once, Martin spent an evening reading about something which had absolutely nothing to do with aviation. After the rather unsettling book he'd been reading in hospital, this was actually a fairly welcome relief.  
  
  
Carolyn did eventually exact payment, of a sort. Whenever MJN was short(er than usual) of money, Martin would find himself spending hours in the muddy park, hiding every time someone walked past, filling a shopping bag with assorted weeds; Carolyn would then tell him what to make out of them (for some reason, it was often quiche) and give him whatever other ingredients he needed - unless the pilots had displeased their benevolent dictator, in which case she would let Arthur loose on the poor innocent plants.  
Douglas complained about the near-ubiquity of “spinach” and “lemon” in their in-flight meals, but otherwise didn't seem to notice anything untoward: on the few occasions when Martin had scratches or tell-tale traces of mud, he claimed to have fallen off the pavement on Park Road (which tilted slightly sideways, making it a hazard to the unstable and a deathtrap in icy weather - hence providing the local newspapers with most of their opinion columns and Letters To The Editor) and into the Notorious Bramble Patch. Since he actually _did_ fall into the Notorious Bramble Patch at least once a fortnight at the best of times (what with his inner-ear problem), he was able to sound convincing enough to fool Douglas (admittedly, Douglas wasn't actually very interested).  
  
  
The Osaka Kettle Incident went down in the annals of MJN history as one of Douglas' finest pranks. Martin's face tried to turn scarlet and green simultaneously, eventually settling on greyish-purple; Arthur, on the other hand, merely complained that he'd _already_ had to clean that out of the passenger loo today after the woman in 4B pretended to be feeling airsick and asked for her boyfriend to come and hold her hair, and did he _have_ to clean the kettle too?  
  
Eventually, Martin managed to call for Carolyn, who did her dragon routine at the front desk until they sent Room Service up to replace the kettle. Room Service took one look at the kettle, sniffed, sighed, and said miserably, “Why do tourists always think nagaimo is funny?”  
  
Carolyn, who knew a little more about Japanese food than Martin or Arthur, immediately asked a few very pertinent questions of Douglas, who happily admitted responsibility and paid for the kettle to be cleaned on the grounds that it had been worth every penny just for the look on Martin's face.  
  
He'd taken a photo of this expression on his phone. Copies appeared all over Fitton Airport two days later, though fortunately nobody found out _what_ had induced the Face.  
  
  
It involved twelve hours of scrabbling around, on hands and knees, in the tidal zone of a beach in _midwinter_ , but Martin did eventually manage to get revenge for the Osaka Kettle Incident.  
  
Douglas' face upon seeing what was poking out of his in-flight meal was impressively blank (with just a hint of constipation), but it was almost half a minute before he was able to speak. Martin claimed a victory.  
(It really was astonishing, Martin thought later through the haze of his stinking cold, just _how_ much a razor-shell clam could look like a great big tonker.)  
  
  
He should have known better by now than to humiliate Douglas Richardson. The next time Douglas made the in-flight meals, Martin was so hungry that he rather stupidly didn't think to ask for an English translation of the dishes' names until after he'd eaten most of his. Douglas had to take control for the rest of the flight out.  
  
“Honestly, Martin, what a _fuss_. I've seen you gorge on haggis, what's so different about _cervelle de veau á la fa_ _ç_ _on provencale_ *?”  
  
Unhappy noises emitted from the loo.**  
  
“All right, perhaps the accompanying _yeux de veau farcis_ *** were a _bit_ much, but I was buying a whole veal head _anyway_...”  
  
Thumping noises, as of someone banging their head on the wall in a desperate attempt to drown out the words.  
  
“In case you were wondering, you wouldn't have been much better off choosing the other meal. I'm afraid that _allumettes de palais de boeuf_ are battered, fried strips of ox palate. Well, veal palate in this case - hence why I bought the whole head. The vegetables and chips were completely innocent, though, if that helps...”  
  
Martin clearly gave in to the demands of his stomach at this point.  
  
Arthur looked confused - not knowing what _palate_ meant, he was wondering why a cow would have had an artists' palette. This was probably just as well, because _he'd_ eaten the _allumettes de palais de boeuf_. (Douglas had won the flight-deck game of the day, hence first pick of the meals – he'd chosen the veal-head broth with tongue, the least objectionable of three evils and _definitely_ worth it to get his own back.)  
  
“Oh, come now, it could have been worse! It could have been cow udder! Or cow lips – remember that market stall piled high with them?”  
  
The retching was now interspersed with pleading noises.  
  
“You've probably eaten _all_ of these before in revoltingly cheap burgers and so on...”  
  
The keening and sobbing from the loo became too much for even Douglas to bear at this point. (He claimed later that he'd only stopped because they needed to return to Fitton ASAP in order to keep their budget - and heads - intact. Martin moaned and begged him not to mention heads. Douglas proceeded to use the word _head_ so many times in the next week that several innocent bystanders asked if he and Martin were “having relationship trouble”. This didn't help Martin's stomach.)  
  
  
*Veal brains with vegetables in tomato sauce.  
**NB: they were currently on stand. There was, therefore, no risk of crashing while Douglas teased Martin.  
***Mushroom-stuffed, breadcrumb-coated, fried veal eyeballs. Serve with braised onions.  
  
  
Martin gave up food-based one-upmanship against Douglas after that. _Nothing_ could beat Douglas' combination of exclusive access to certain hard-to-find ingredients _and_ extensive knowledge of the nastiest dishes ever invented.  
  
He still found himself being served balut. After a flight to _Iceland_. (Douglas claimed to have forgotten that seagull eggs are gathered from the wild and need to be candled, but nobody believed him. It also made Martin increasingly paranoid that Douglas knew about the wild plants, though in fact he didn't.)  
  
Martin dreaded the day when Douglas would persuade Customs to let him bring live prawns or octopus on board G-ERTI. Douglas frequently hinted that the time was near, but in fact had no intention of doing so - it would be a _very_ bad idea to serve only-mostly-dead creatures in front of Arthur. (He would, if interrogated, have insisted that his reticence was merely a desire to avoid a roaring-at from Carolyn.)  
  
  
At Christmas, Karl from ATC was given a copy of _Fatal Words_ by Steven Cushing. He was almost certain that he knew his Secret Santa's identity; he didn't dare read the book, in case it put him off his job.  
  
Everybody else at Fitton Airport received a jar labelled “pickled samphire”. They found out too late that there are _two_ , unrelated, species of shore plant named _samphire_.**** And Martin's gift was _not_ the fashionable, near-tasteless marsh samphire.  
On the plus side, at least he'd pickled it (a little research revealed that it wasn't even _vaguely_ bearable otherwise).  
   
****Except Douglas, who _did_ already know, was looking forward to everyone else's discovery, and thought that this belated comeback for the various humiliations at the Flap And Throttle was one of the most cunning things Martin had ever done.

**Author's Note:**

> The hospital phoned the landline because Carolyn's mobile was switched off. The extension was installed back in the days before mobiles, and has never been removed.
> 
> Carolyn's line about lemons refers to deodorising a microwave by cooking lemon peels and juice in it.
> 
> Arthur's “soap scones” were due to him using bicarbonate of soda instead of baking powder, AND once again forgetting the difference between teaspoons and dessert spoons.
> 
> The bright red face is one of Martin's poisoning symptoms (malar erythema, to be precise).
> 
> I made up the discontinued limited-edition Toblerones, although they might possibly exist – I couldn't find anything to confirm or refute this idea online.
> 
> Magic mushrooms do tend to grow near sewage works, at least in my town. According to my mum.
> 
> The not-a-goosefoot was Dog's Mercury, which does look very like many goosefoot species but lives in woods rather than open ground – Martin didn't have much time (or bandwidth) to do his research, and was too self-conscious to forage out in the open. The only clinical information on Dog's Mercury poisoning is from a couple who ate rather a lot (boiled, so they did survive): http://www.bmj.com/highwire/filestream/344392/field_highwire_article_pdf/0/1924.full.pdf. Martin, in this fic, has eaten only a small amount (boiled), so I reduced the severity of the symptoms and the recovery time slightly.  
> He's hooked up to treatment for nephritis in the hospital scene – the most severe symptom of Dog's Mercury poisoning. Other symptoms include the red face (above), fever, vomiting, diarrhoea, haemolysis (fortunately much less severe if the plant was boiled), gastritis and drowsiness.
> 
> Monjayaki is a Japanese dish which looks horrifically like fried vomit.
> 
> The pigeon incident is based on my encounter with a similar pigeon which turned up in my garden. The difference is that my cats got to the pigeon first, but I had to mercy-kill it – in the same way that Martin does here, but with a brick instead of a stone - because my cats are useless hunters and just left it with a leg hanging off.
> 
> The first book Carolyn gives Martin is the same one he gives to Karl from ATC later on. (He saved up and bought a copy online for Karl – he liked the book too much to part with his own copy.) It is a real book, which reads like someone's dissertation, and there are several pages which could easily be Martin telling off Karl and Douglas. (I saw it in a charity shop and instantly thought of Captain Crieff!)
> 
> The second book isn't based on any foraging guide in particular.
> 
> The “spinach” is various plants, mostly nettles and actual goosefoots. The “lemon” is sorrel.
> 
> Nagaimo looks like human ejaculate (the idea of filling a hotel kettle with it was inspired by Steve Ashen mentioning on his YouTube channel that he found a pubic hair on a hotel kettle). 
> 
> Razor-shell clams really do look like great big tonkers if cooked whole.
> 
> Everything which Douglas serves up is a real recipe. He had to bribe a farmer quite heavily to get a whole veal head, since animal brains are banned from human consumption in the UK.
> 
> Martin is afraid that Douglas will serve odori ebi or sannakji.
> 
> The other samphire is Rock Samphire. Which tastes of carrots and paraffin, though not so strongly if pickled. It's the one mentioned in Shakespeare's “King Lear”, although its popularity has declined so it's once again available from accessible locations rather than cliff-faces.


End file.
